The dazzling, devious, doomed sound of James Booker

Dr John called James Booker ‘the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced’. Booker died in 1983 at 43, ruined by drugs, drink and madness. Though he appeared on plenty of other people’s records and stages — Dr John, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King — Booker recorded only three studio albums in his lifetime. Classified, recorded in October 1982 and now re-released on vinyl, was the last of them. It might not be the best of them, but it shows why Booker was one of the greats.

The studio was booked for three days, but Booker had a breakdown the week before and couldn’t get a good take in the first two days. He revived on the third and recorded Classified in four hours. He sounds dazzling and devious, mournful and ecstatic, lyrical and doomed, all at the same time.

Booker has a clear virtuoso signature. His left hand pushes the bass rhythm with anticipatory octaves, and stretches the feel with thick, arpeggiated mid-range chords. His right hand is behind the beat, with triplets and ornaments tumbling out of four-note block chords.

He opens ‘King of the Road’ with a torrential obbligato that nods to ‘Eleanor Rigby’. He understates his vocals with strictly percussive chords, then erupts into a ten-fingered finale, foot jammed on the sustain pedal as he howls ‘I’m a man of means’ with rising desperation, before subsiding into ‘I’m king of the road’ in a yodelling sob. ‘All right?’ he asks the producer. ‘A little different?’

Booker’s father was a dancer turned Baptist minister, his mother a church singer. At nine, he was hit by an ambulance and nearly lost a leg; hospital morphine began his addiction.